Jenny Sanford shows her strength again

Saturday

Jun 27, 2009 at 3:59 PM

'His career is not a concern of mine. He’s going to have to worry about that,' governor's wife tells reporters.

By MONICA DAVEYNew York Times

As Jenny Sanford headed off for a boating trip, the day after her husband, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, told the world he had been unfaithful, she met the throng of reporters waiting outside her South Carolina vacation home, all inquiring about her emotional condition.

“Am I O.K.?” Mrs. Sanford repeated, from the driver’s seat of a vehicle. “You know what? I have great faith and I have great friends and great family. We have a good Lord in this world, and I know I’m going to be fine. Not only will I survive, I’ll thrive.”

It was, friends and former aides say, classic Jenny Sanford — strong willed, steely, anything but a victim. Mrs. Sanford, a former New York investment banker, largely gave up her professional life and turned to helping her husband’s political career, but those who know her well say she was also never one to abandon her sense of identity, her direction, or her own opinions.

To one reporter who wondered what might come of Mr. Sanford’s political career, Mrs. Sanford answered sharply: “His career is not a concern of mine. He’s going to have to worry about that. I’m worried about my family and the character of my children.” And with that, Mrs. Sanford, who spent much of Thursday with her husband and said she was working on her marriage, pulled away, smilingly telling the assembled cameras, “I wish we had room on the boat for you all, but we do not.”

Even within the dimensions of her husband’s political life, Mrs. Sanford was not merely a helpmate in a traditional first lady role, but managed her husband’s political campaigns (at first, from their basement) and later acted as a sounding board on matters of policy, a fact that one former aide to Mr. Sanford said regularly irked some members of his staff. She often studied data that was sent to the governor’s office and helped develop positions, one senior legislative staff member said, describing her as “the real brains behind the operation.”

Mrs. Sanford, 46, was the second of five children born to an prominent, Irish Catholic family in Winnetka, Ill., a lush suburb of Chicago with private drives and palatial homes. She was, as one friend from Winnetka puts it, part of Chicago’s gentry — with a grandfather who helped found the company that made and sold the first portable electric saw, another grandfather and uncle who were leaders at the Winston and Strawn law firm, and even a family tie to Rushton Skakel Sr., the brother of Ethel Kennedy.

Despite the wealth and prestige Mrs. Sanford brought to her marriage, friends say she was not one to put on airs. Friends in South Carolina described her as a “down-to-earth” mother who insisted that her four sons set the dining room table even once they were living inside the governor’s mansion and had a staff.

Through a spokeswoman, Mrs. Sanford declined requests to be interviewed for this article, but told The Associated Press she learned of her husband’s affair early this year when she found a letter he had written. She told him to end the relationship, but he repeatedly asked permission to visit the woman in Argentina in the months that followed.

“I said absolutely not,” Mrs. Sanford told The A.P. “It’s one thing to forgive adultery. It’s another to condone it.”

Then, last week, when the governor told her he needed time alone to write, she had specifically warned him not to see his mistress. She said she was devastated when he went to meet her in Argentina.

Many of Mrs. Sanford’s relatives, friends and neighbors in Winnetka and South Carolina declined to be quoted by name or refused to speak of her.

Mrs. Sanford attended a private, Catholic all-girls school in Lake Forest, Ill. At Georgetown University, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1984 with a finance degree, she was viewed as whip smart and a hard worker. A fellow student recalled her entering an accounting exam she had not prepared well for. The test was not timed, though, so Mrs. Sanford arrived with a six-pack of Tab and worked for eight hours on it. As the classmate recalls it, her grade was among the highest that day.

“She is one of those people who is always the smartest person in the room,” said Marjory Wentworth, a friend who is also the poet laureate of South Carolina.

It was during her time working at Lazard Freres & Company, the investment bank, that she met Mr. Sanford at a beach party in the Hamptons. “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight,” she once told The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C. “It was more like friendship at first sight.”

In 1989, the couple married, but it was not until she had her second child that politics entered their family picture. “It was quite a surprise to me,” she told The Greenville News of South Carolina. “When he told me, I was in the hospital, and we had just delivered our second son. So we had a 15-month-old and a newborn, and he says to me, ‘I’m going to run for Congress.’ ”

From home, Mrs. Sanford managed that first campaign in 1994, and then his run for governor.

At times, Mrs. Sanford could be tough, a former aide said. The aide, who declined to be named because he is still in touch with the governor and is not authorized to speak, said four aides to Mr. Sanford had departed his Congressional staff in rapid succession, in part because of her. “She was the No. 1 sounding board for him, and she would give her views to people,” the former aide said. “Clearly it was always an issue — exactly what her role was to be.”

Friends, however, credit Mrs. Sanford with the ultimate juggling act: happily serving as a first lady who would choose one of her son’s class plays over a presidential dinner anytime, but who was also perfectly comfortable discussing intricacies of the state’s finances.

“So often when a woman is business minded, they’re not good at being a cookie baking soccer mom, but that’s the thing about Jenny,” said Jennifer Pickens, a friend for over a decade. “You cannot stereotype her that way. She can be either one of those things and do it effortlessly.”

In recent weeks, and even on Wednesday, as her husband acknowledged his affair, friends said Mrs. Sanford had remained cheerful, gracious and strong. Lalla Lee Campsen, a friend of 20 years, was with Mrs. Sanford that day and described it as a time “when Jenny exuded, perhaps as never before, her great strength of character.”

Her friends praised the statement she issued that day, saying that she would press to repair her marriage and forgive but that she had also asked her husband to leave — at least for now.

“That was definitely her, all her,” Ms. Pickens reflected. “It reeks of her. She will survive this beautifully.”

Research and reporting was contributed by Shaila Dewan from Atlanta, Alain Delaquérière from New York, Kitty Bennett from Washington and Karen Ann Cullotta from Winnetka, Ill.

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